Recently, "Our Life in Studying Abroad" and its producer Zhang Liling appeared on the news list of the media because they were accused of "forgery" by some newspapers. The trivial right and wrong is not what we care about, but this fierce lawsuit or "quasi-lawsuit" provides an excuse for us to replay China's new documentary movement.
In many people's minds, the upper limit of China's new documentary is 199 1 seeing the Great Wall, while in others' minds, the upper limit of China's new documentary is Wu 1990 wandering in Beijing. These are actually two different routes, and we must trace them back.
In a sense, "Looking at the Great Wall" has become the first documentary in China that looks like a documentary. The long shot, the actual voice, is the host of the interviewer's identity (not the reciter and presenter). It soon became a pattern and was imitated by followers. The modified or abbreviated version of this model is the living space modified by 1993. Documentary editing room, which appeared in the prime time of Shanghai TV station before, is a relatively independent paradigm. Although there are many similar elements between them, their similarity is not or more than mutual reference, but from the introduction and learning of foreign documentaries.
Independent filmmaker Jiang Yue once made more than 30 short films 10 minutes for living space. One of the films tells the whole process of a female worker squeezing a car to go to work in the morning in the No.3 National Cotton Factory. She went to work at 7: 30, went out at 5: 00 in the morning, changed a direction, changed buses four times, and was still late for work.
Such a movie is certainly touching. But after reading the works of some foreign documentary masters, independent producers can no longer be satisfied with such simple records. Japanese Ogawa Shinsuke and American Wiseman have a decisive influence on China's documentary independent filmmakers. China documentary people have learned from them what a real documentary is and what attitude they should take towards reality. Everyone got used to riff-raff quickly. Wu, Duan Jinchuan, Jiang Yue and others all spent a year or even two making a film. They approach the subject more patiently and equally, and capture the most authentic, textured and meaningful life scenes. Jianning Kang's Master of Yin and Yang, Wu's Jianghu, Duan Jinchuan's Bakou South Street 16, Jiang Yue's The Other Side and other long documentaries were all polished in the long wait. These independently produced and filmed works are more direct and objective, eliminating the usual narration, explanation, interview and other techniques in the propaganda film. For them, taking a hasty picture is equivalent to wasting a good subject. In the interview, Duan Jinchuan criticized "An HIV-infected person" filmed by a TV station. "The theme is very good, but very bad, and very hasty. Shoot once every three days and five days. A month later, it took two days to shoot, and it was over. I got a 50-minute. " Duan Jinchuan 100 minutes "No.16" was filmed for one year, and Li-Na Yang's "The Old Man" was filmed for two and a half years and cut for half a year.
What marks the progress of China's new documentary is not only the essential change of concept and form, but also the pure technical update. With the development of digital technology, recording equipment is becoming smaller and more personalized. Taking photos, recording and editing can be done independently and easily by one person, and producers can record their original life more calmly and freely. The changes it brings may be revolutionary. Wu Shuo, this is his dream personal way. With a DV player as small as a pen, he can make a documentary like a writer's. He even started to keep a diary with a DV player. This change has prompted many outsiders to enter the ranks of documentary production, which means many new possibilities.
Documentary is progressing, but the documentary market is shrinking. Compared with the prosperity in the early 1990s, today's documentaries seem to be at a low ebb for a long time. China documentaries have almost no mass base, which is the knowledge of some documentary producers. The strongest evidence is that no one has shown or watched this documentary. The documentary editing room of Shanghai TV set a rating of 36% that year, which was more popular than TV series, and now it has plummeted to 7%-8%. "Our Life in Studying Abroad" can achieve such high ratings. A senior documentary producer said that it is because the producers can thoroughly understand what the domestic audience wants to see and fully cater to it. She provided a soap opera documentary which is also very popular abroad. The most popular TV programs are TV series, football and other variety shows.
In fact, documentaries can't become a hot spot for viewing, which is normal in foreign countries. Even if the media is developed, such as France, there is only one TV station dedicated to broadcasting documentaries. However, with the achievements of China Documentary and the public's concern for reality, we really shouldn't be so indifferent to it. Some excellent works that cost producers a lot of effort have been pushed to the bottom of the author's box after traveling around the world at the film festival. With the shrinking of documentary columns, the production and dissemination of TV documentaries have long been less fanfare than in the early 1990s. Documentary producers run to bars and universities with videotapes and high-definition machines, and the effect is almost negligible.
Although "our study abroad life" is the topic of this issue, it is almost impossible to discuss it seriously as a sample, because many things about this "incident" have not been clarified so far. Let's borrow a similar version to have a look. 1993 NHK "fraud" incident in Japan. The famous "NHK Special Edition" broadcasted "Wild Horse, a Kingdom Deep in the Himalayas", and some creators exposed the "forgery" to the media, which caused great shock. Shocked, President NHK made an "apology speech" on TV without fully verifying the "fraud". Therefore, "the scale of written media reports even exceeds the killing." Afterwards, it was concluded that the director did not deliberately fabricate the behavior. An important and most criticized example: "Mountain sickness". In fact, a member of the film crew did fall ill because of "mountain sickness" on the way, but the film crew was too busy taking care of the patients to take pictures, so the director decided to "recreate" this scene on the way back. The director of this film was finally suspended and his salary was reduced. Throughout the history of documentaries, we will find that "performance" and "reproduction" have always been one of the methods used in documentaries. The question is: where is the bottom line of this "fiction"?
The father of documentary, Flahadi, invited the aborigines to "reproduce" the fishing and hunting methods they once owned but have basically forgotten in his masterpieces, Nanuke in the North, Sea Romance and Alan Islander, which are still of anthropological value. The premise here is that the parties "do exist", not "fabrication" out of nothing.
There is also a bottom line. When many lost events cannot be recorded immediately, when "moving" is adopted appropriately, it will be prompted or marked in the film. This is the way used by many programs of the famous Discovery Channel in time warner Inc.. The advantage of this method is that all films will not be in danger of "total distortion" because of individual "dynamic" realism, and the past and future are the lifeblood of documentaries.